4:25PM - 5PM Discussion of open problems stemming from the presentations.

Talk Title]

Bio-Inspired Autonomy for Mobile Sensor Networks

Abstract]

There is an increasing trend for robots to serve as networked mobile sensing platforms that are able to collect data and interact with humans in various types of environment in unprecedented ways. The need for undisturbed operation posts higher goals for autonomy. This talk reviews recent developments in autonomous collective foraging in a complex environment that explicitly integrates insights from biology with models and provable strategies from control theory and robotics. The methods are rigorously developed and tightly integrated with experimental effort with promising results achieved.

Bio]

Dr. Fumin Zhang joined Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007 as an assistant professor. He received a PhD degree in 2004 from the University of Maryland (College Park) in Electrical Engineering, and held a postdoctoral position in Princeton University from 2004 to 2007. His B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in electrical engineering, are from Tsinghua University in Beijing.

His major research focus is design and control of underwater robots and mobile sensor networks. Among his recent research interests is cyber-physical systems theory with a focus on feasibility of control tasks on embedded computing devices. His research emphasizes the importance of the balance between theory and applications. He has published articles in major journals on theoretical control and robotics. Meanwhile, his theoretical contributions are implemented on actual robots and sensor networks as distributed control and sensing algorithms.